Players Come and Go as Deadline Creates 'Gang Warfare'

LONDON — Just when it seemed Europe’s winter sales of soccer flesh could get no more bizarre, new buyers appeared in the window.

David Beckham became the celebrity signing in Paris. The police fired off tear gas in central Milan to disperse fans drawn to Mario Balotelli’s return home. Players crossed paths in planes, trains and cars as they were rushed in or out of the revolving doors of desperate clubs like Queens Park Rangers and Newcastle United, which are trying to preserve their status in England’s lucrative English Premier League.

“It’s like gang warfare out there,” said Harry Redknapp, soccer’s arch transfer wheeler and dealer of past midwinter player auctions. Agents are trying to “scupper” one another, he said. “They’re all fighting for big money, all muscling in on deals claiming they represent the player.”

His club, Queens Park Rangers, had sacked its manager, Mark Hughes, in midseason. In doing so, Rangers’ relatively new chairman, Tony Fernandes, from Malaysia, was backing one manager’s judgment against another’s. Players lauded by Hughes were chastised by Redknapp, and condemned for their performance by landing the high-paying club at the foot of the Premiership standings.

Get me a new striker, said Redknapp. Fernandes obliged with Loïc Rémy, who cost around £8 million, or $12.6 million, from Marseille.

Get me a big, strong, commanding central defender, said Harry. And Tony surprised even the veteran Redknapp by invoking a £12 million release clause in the contract that bound the Congolese muscle man Christopher Samba to Anzhi Makhachkala in the Russian league.

Samba had been away from England just 11 months. He had to get away from his previous team, Blackburn Rovers, because he felt its Indian owners were clueless in how to run an English Premier League club.

But while the money was great in Dagestan, where Anzhi is based, other things, like racism, were unacceptable. According to Guus Hiddink, the Dutchman currently in charge of playing matters at Makhachlaka, Samba was gone without so much as saying goodbye once the release clause took effect.

Anzhi, though, is a new player, a new dimension in Russian soccer. Since buying the club two years ago, Suleyman Kerimov, a rich Dagestan politician, businessman and investor, has challenged the oligarchs empowering Russian teams.

His response to losing Samba appears to be trumping the wealthiest English clubs, Chelsea and Manchester City, by engaging an even greater release cause in a contract.

Reports Thursday suggest that Willian, one of the many coveted Brazilians at the Ukraine club Shakhtar Donetsk, is on his way to Dagestan.

The fee? A cool £34 million, or $54 million.

That is the transfer figure. The salary arrangements between the proposed new employer and the 24-year-old Brazilian playmaker will be negotiated in the coming days.

There is time because the deadline of midnight Thursday in Western Europe does not apply in the east, where the teams are closed down for the winter and trades can be completed until March.

“This is a personal decision and we must respect it,” said Mircea Lucescu, the much-traveled coach of Shakhtar. “There is a club willing to pay the relase clause in his contract, and Willian agreed to move. To tell you frankly, I tried to convince him to stay because I think his decision is hasty and not thought out well enough. He came to Shakhtar almost as a child, he was like a son to me.”

They all are, until they are tempted to fly the nest. If and when the deal is done, Willian’s departure will be a significant loss to Donetsk’s own promising progress in the Champions League — and no doubt a challenge to the Ukrainian team’s own billionaire owner, who has spent years building the dream.

Meantime, the fee for this particular piece of trafficking amounts to almost a third of the entire sum being speculated in the English market. And the English Premier League is the biggest sales pitch in the world.

Much of it is bankrolled by owners seldom seen at their clubs. The returns come from global television rights that amount to more than £50 million per team per season.

That drives the manic midwinter buying, which then casts ripples across the world markets.

The Bundesliga clubs, in good old German fashion, have too much sense to buy in haste during January. The Spanish and Italians, with notable exceptions, are relatively cautious, if not totally financially hamstrung. The French, aside from Paris St. Germain, are net sellers.

And the players — and those agents — take what they can get.

Samba’s move, for example, has sound rationale once the hair-trigger nature of it is stripped out. Q.P.R. was losing its defensive leader, the New Zealander Ryan Nelsen who, is joining Toronto F.C. as its new head coach.

Nelsen figured his time had come. Most men — Beckham apart — know that their playing value starts to diminish at Nelsen’s age, 35.

Q.P.R. trawled the world to replace him, and paid the price for the 1.94-meter, or 6-foot 4-inch, Samba.

“He’s just what we need,” drooled Redknapp, the manager. “Chris is a monster. Great in the air, quick, strong, fantastic in both boxes, hard as nails. He’s a proper center half.”

Samba said: “I’m delighted to be back in the Premier League. It’s the best league in the world to play football.”